Taylor Pool Water Test Kit, Complete Swimming Pool Water Test Kit, for Chlorine, pH, and Alkaline Levels, Ideal for Pools, Hot Tubs, and Spas, 1-Pack

Checked against the pool store sample and its close enough. The cool part with this kit is the acid/alkalinity demand option. If either are high/low, you add drops of the demand reagent until the color matches where you want your reading to be. Then you look the drops up on the chart in the back of the book and it tells you how much acid/soda to add based on gallons. It works great. My pool is 26,000 gal so you have to add up the 20, 5 and 1,000 gal amts to get the correct dosage. Or just take the half the 50,000 gal amount. Don't be a slave to the pool store. You can do it yourself.

This is a quality water test kit for pool owners, comes well packaged and with excellent instructions for usage. Well worth the price and is very accurate when used per instructions.Highy recommended !

There are similar test kits out there, I cannot speak for those. I got a 7500 gallon above ground pool hearing my whole life how much of a nightmare they are and how expensive the chemicals are. I didn't care, I wanted a pool. I also got test strips, they were not nearly good enough. This pool is round, 18ft diameter and 52" deep. The volume of your pool directly reflects how much your chemicals will cost. I'll kind of break that down as well in this review. Keep in mind, my pool is only 7500 gallons.I ordered this. It allows you to do a bunch of tests and comes with a nice guidebook on what it all means. It's a lot but if you read the little book it's very interesting and gives you an actual understanding of some of the many things happening in your water.The bottle sizes are small and you can only test for CYA a handful of times (you shouldn't need more than this kit for a solid summer of learning) and some of the tests you only need to do once or twice a season, so those bottles will last a long time.For the tests that require frequent testing, which changes depending on your water source, there is quite a bit here. I have very high alkalinity in my water, so there was a lot of alkaline and PH tests I had to do before I got that in check. My hardness was alright, and PH will move around a bit since chemicals aren't neutral, but for me my PH tends to go up, so a couple bottles of muriatic acid lasts the entire year, easily.I'll review the product first. I love this thing. There's 2 sizes so it's recommended to get the one with the larger size bottles. I got the smaller one and honestly it's enough. As I said, most of the tests aren't even monthly tests, and even the larger size bottles are still pretty small for the regular tests. You can purchase a 16oz bottle of R-0871 and a half pound of R-0870 powder for less than the cost of this entire kit, and you'll be able to test chlorine every day of the year 20 times if you want.So i recommend getting this kit, learning the chemistry, then just buying large bottles from Taylor of the refills you use often. This is a perfect starting point though and it will save you money.Most of the tests are very simple once you get the hang of it. Get a water sample, put in a few drops of a certain bottle, put in drops from another bottle, reference a sheet, add what it says. A few have an extra step and a few have even less steps. Once you learn it, you can pop out a chlorine test in a minute. I pretty much end up putting a red solo cup (2 cups) of 10% liquid chlorine in the pool a day now that the pool is balanced, and every 2 weeks I need to add a cup of muriatic acid. Of course you need to balance everything first and get your CYA levels right, but if you read the booklet you'll understand all that in no time.Cost: So I spent the summer learning and trying to figure out the ins and outs so I did a few experiments so I probably used more chemicals than I had to overall just to get the hang of it, but here's what I spent.I spent about 20 dollars in muriatic acid, bought a massive bottle of pool conditioner(cya) for like 30 bucks that should last years, a box of shock powder packets for 30 bucks, and about a gallon of 10% liquid chlorine a week. sometimes more, sometimes less. Those gallon jugs are 6 bucks each approx.Overall, now that it's balanced, on average for a 7500 gallon pool, I don't spend more than 10 bucks a week. The odd time I go on vacation and the water gets a little out of control, I just shut off the pump, let it settle, and vacuum it out to waste a few times then dump in a packet of shock powder and turn the pump back on and clean everything a couple more times and it's crystal clear again.I'm about to now purchase larger sizes of the chemicals to check chlorine levels and I should be good to go for years.

I gave up using a weekly pool service after hiring and firing three companies over the last 18 months. Your experience may be different but everyone I hired send a tech over who brushed the sides of the pool, dumped in a lot of chlorine and left. Whenever I became suspicious of the water I'd take a sample to a local pool store to find that I really shouldn't be swimming in that water. I used to do my own pool maintenance for a number of years - I didn't really want to take the task on again but I think I'm the only person I can trust.Any pool owner will tell you that brushing the sides and the steps plus cleaning the various filters is the easy part. Keeping the chemicals in balance is the more difficult task. You'll also learn that you can't always trust the pool store analysis. The cynic in me thinks they're just trying to sell me chemicals but it's possible that the tech in the store simply doesn't know much more than I do. I had an old test kit that only tested for pH and chlorine. That's usually enough but I also wanted to check other readings that mattered or at least have a way to confirm what the pool store was telling me.I have to admit that I was a bit intimidated at first with all the tests I can do with this kit. But, with a bit of research and paying attention to the included user manual and just some good old common sense I found it very easy. It's currently winter here in the Phoenix area and while the pool is open no one in their right mind would step foot in it - the water is cold and I'm not going to heat it. Because of the water temperature and the fact that the fired tech had my chlorine level jacked up to over 8.0 I haven't had to do much with the chemicals. But, I did learn that my CYA level is very high so I'll be replacing the water in the next month. So far my routine has been to check pH and chlorine levels weekly and performing additional tests once a month. This is a schedule that will probably continue throughout the year unless I notice anything out of the ordinary.It's nice to have a good kit that gives accurate readings at my side.